On Tue, Dec 1, 2020 at 3:40 PM Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org> wrote:

Along those lines, it's always been interesting to me the way that Dijkstra's statement about goto must have influenced language design. The original "GOTO Statement Considered Harmful" note was quite damning, but I wonder if it meant to be: it strikes me that the really dangerous thing about "goto" isn't its mere existence or even its use, but rather, it's unconstrained use when better alternatives exist in the language. As one can observe in well-written C code, judicious use of `goto` can be quite elegant in comparison to the alternative.

D-1stra originally sent "Go to [...]" to CACM as a paper entitled "A Case Against The Go To Statement".  But the editor, who was Niklaus Wirth, thought it important to publish it quickly, so he turned it into a letter to the editor and retitled it.